When I was in college, students returned to campus during a month-long lull between the end of winter break and the start of spring semester. We’d sleep until noon, and store up enough concentrated fun to get us through yet another grueling term. You could take courses during this rare moratorium, but they weren’t the typically rigorous ones we were used to. My favorites were a series of one-credit weeklong courses devoted to reading and discussing a single book. It was the only time my favorite English professor, a forbidding half-Brit who normally barked questions about Virginia Woolf’s drafting process during seminars, became a sympathetic teacher to a motley crew of super-studious English-major overachievers and students who never read fiction, much less studied it. Slowly and carefully, we read our way through Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. If I’d been reading for a seminar, I would’ve read as quickly as possible. We did not. We read closely. We read as if we’d been entrusted with a sacred text that happened to be by Wharton.
This deliberate, reverential approach to literature is the operating principle behind Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile’s liturgically derived podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, which comes to Portland this Sunday. Zoltan and ter Kuile both have secular backgrounds—Zoltan comes from an atheist Jewish family, and ter Kuile grew up in the UK, where he says only around six percent of the population attends church. But they share an appreciation for religious ritual and community, and bonded in divinity school over the idea of adapting reading practices culled from religion and applying them to secular texts.
Zoltan started with Jane Eyre, and led a Bible study-style reading group. “Casper’s a very good friend… so he came one week and we were sitting there after all the participants left and he was like, ‘This is wonderful. I love it. It would be even better with a book people actually wanted to read,’” says Zoltan. “So I was like, ‘Like what? Everyone wants to read Jane Eyre.’ And he was like, ‘Like Harry Potter.’”